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one else, perhaps, can it be said so truthfully that "he had thrown away the fear of that which was earthly and had escaped out of the narrow gloomy life into the realm of the ideal." And it may be observed, in closing, that he had lived surrounded only by the most exalted ideas and the most brilliant visions which it is possible for a mortal to appropriate and to create. One who thus departs from earth cannot be regarded as otherwise than happy.

      THE EARLY ROMANTIC SCHOOL

      By JAMES TAFT HATFIELD, PH.D.

      Professor of the German Language and Literature, Northwestern University.

      The latter half of the eighteenth century has been styled the Age of Enlightenment, a convenient name for a period in which there was a noticeable attempt to face the obvious, external facts of life in a clear-eyed and courageous way. The centralizing of political power in the hands of Louis XIV. of France and his successors had been accompanied by a "standardizing" of human affairs which favored practical efficiency and the easier running of the social machine, but which was far from helpful to the self-expression of distinctly-marked individuals.

      The French became sovereign arbiters of taste and form, but their canons of art were far from nature and the free impulses of mankind. The particular development of this spirit of clarity in Berlin, the centre of German influence, lay in the tendency to challenge all historic continuity, and to seek uniformity based upon practical needs.

      Rousseau's revolutionary protests against inequality and artificiality—particularly his startling treatise On the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754)—and his fervent preaching of the everlasting superiority of the heart to the head, constitute the most important factor in a great revolt against regulated social institutions, which led, at length, to the "Storm and Stress" movement in Germany, that boisterous forerunner of Romanticism, yet so unlike it that even Schlegel compared its most typical representatives to the biblical herd of swine which stampeded—into oblivion. Herder, proclaiming the vital connection between the soul of a whole nation and its literature, and preaching a religion of the feelings rather than a gospel of "enlightenment;" young Goethe, by his daring and untrammeled Shakespearian play, Goetz von Berlichingen, and by his open defiance, announced in Werther, of the authority of all artistic rules and standards; and Bürger, asserting the right of the common man to be the only arbiter of literary values, were, each in his own way, upsetting the control of an artificial "classicism." Immanuel Kant, whose deep and dynamic thinking led to a revolution comparable to a cosmic upheaval in the geological world, compelled his generation to discover a vast new moral system utterly disconcerting to the shallow complacency of those who had no sense of higher values than "practical efficiency."

      When, in 1794, Goethe and Schiller, now matured and fully seasoned by a deep-going classical and philosophical discipline, joined their splendid forces and devoted their highest powers to the building up of a comprehensive esthetic philosophy, the era was fully come for new constructive efforts on German soil. Incalculably potent was the ferment liberated by Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795-1796)—its attacking the problem of life from the emotional and esthetic side; its defense of the "call" of the individual as outweighing the whole social code; its assertion that genius outranks general laws, and imagination every-day rules; its abundance of "poetic" figures taking their part in the romance.

      The birth of the Romantic School can be pretty definitely set at about 1796; its cradle was in the quaint university town of Jena, at that time the home of Schiller and his literary-esthetic enterprises, and only a few miles away from Goethe in Weimar. Five names embody about all that was most significant in the earlier movement: Fichte, the brothers Friedrich and Wilhelm Schlegel, Tieck, and Novalis.

      The discussion of Fichte belonging to another division of this work, it is enough to recall here that he was already professor of philosophy at Jena when the Schlegel brothers made their home there in 1796, and that it was while there that he published his Doctrine of Science, the charter of independence of the Romantic School, announcing the annihilation of physical values, proclaiming the soul as above things perceived, the inner spirit as that alembic in which all objects are produced. With almost insolent freshness Fichte asserted a re-valuation of all values: what had been "enlightenment" was now to be called shallowness; "ancient crudities" were to be reverenced as deeper perceptions of truth; "fine literature" was to be accounted a frivolous thing. Fichte made a stirring appeal to young men, especially, as being alone able to perceive the meaning of science and poetry.

      To take part in the contagion of these ideas, there settled in Jena in 1796 the two phenomenal Schlegel brothers. It is not easy or necessary to separate, at this period, the activities of their agile minds. From their early days, as sons in a most respectable Lutheran parsonage in North Germany, both had shown enormous hunger for cultural information, both had been voracious in exploiting the great libraries within their reach. It is generally asserted that they were lacking in essential virility and stamina; as to the brilliancy of their acquisitions, their fineness of appreciation, and their wit, there can be no question whatever. Madame de Staël called them "the fathers of modern criticism," a title which has not been challenged by the best authorities of our time.

      Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829), the younger of the two, is counted to be the keener and more original mind. He had a restless and unsettled youth, mostly spent in studies; after various disappointments, he determined to make classical antiquity his life-work; while mastering the body of ancient literature, he was assimilating, with much the same sort of eagerness, the philosophical systems of Kant and Fichte. His first notable publication was an esthetic-philosophic essay, in the ample style of Schiller's later discourses, Concerning the Study of Greek Poetry. He found in the Greeks of the age of Sophocles the ideal of a fully developed humanity, and exhibited throughout the discussion a remarkable mastery of the whole field of classical literature. Just at this time he removed to Jena to join his older brother, Wilhelm, who was connected with Schiller's monthly The Hours and his annual Almanac of the Muses. By a strange condition of things Friedrich was actively engaged at the moment in writing polemic reviews for the organs of Reichardt, one of Schiller's most annoying rivals in literary journalism; these reviews became at once noticeable for their depth and vigorous originality, particularly that one which gave a new and vital characterization of Lessing. In 1797 he moved to Berlin, where he gathered a group about him, including Tieck, and in this way established the external and visible body of the Romantic School, which the brilliant intellectual atmosphere of the Berlin salons, with their wealth of gifted and cultured women, did much to promote. In 1799 both he and Tieck joined the Romantic circle at Jena.

      In Berlin he published in 1798 the first volume of the Athenæum, that journal which in a unique way represents the pure Romantic ideal at its actual fountain-head. It survived for three years, the last volume appearing in 1800. Its aim was to "collect all rays of human culture into one focus," and, more particularly, to confute the claim of the party of "enlightenment" that the earlier ages of human development were poor and unworthy of respect on the part of the closing eighteenth century. A very large part of the journal was written by the two brothers, Friedrich furnishing the most aggressive contributions, more notably being responsible for the epigrammatic Fragments, which became, in their, detached brevity and irresponsibility, a very favorite model for the form of Romantic doctrine. "I can talk daggers," he had said when younger, and he wrote the greater part of these, though some were contributed by Wilhelm Schlegel, by his admirable wife Caroline, by Schleiermacher, and Novalis. The root of this form lies in French thinking and expression—especially the short deliverances of Chamfort, the epigrammatist of the French Revolution. These Orphic-apocalyptic sentences are a sort of foundation for a new Romantic bible. They are absolutely disconnected, they show a mixture and interpenetration of different spheres of thought and observation, with an unexpected deference to the appraisals of classic antiquity. Their range is unlimited: philosophy and psychology, mathematics and esthetics, philosophy and natural science, sociology and society, literature and the theatre are all largely represented in their scope.

      Friedrich Schlegel's epigrammatic wit is the direct precursor of Heine's clever conceits in prose: one is instantly reminded of him by such Athenæum-fragments as "Kant, the Copernicus of Philosophy;" "Plato's philosophy is a worthy preface to the religion of the future;" "So-called 'happy marriages' are related to love,

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